much fun was had this weekend.

thanks to the incredible generosity of the new life and christ chapel congregations, my little honda was fit to burst on the drive up to rochester, stuffed full of wedding shower loot. honestly, it was an amazing thing for a church i no longer attend and a church i barely know to pour out their respective hearts for me and benjamin, and i am grateful. and so is he. benjamin. grateful.

so my car was jam-packed, and benjamin and i had a grand old time un-packing and -packaging it all, finding room for everything in our larger-than-it-looks kitchen. i made a jigsaw puzzle out of a big cabinet. Among the highlights:

• hand-made glass napkin rings, intertwined blue and green. spectacular.
• a chocolate fondue pot, with forks! bring on the strawberries!
• a giant rolling pin. busije. i'll send my great-grandmother pictures, and she will be proud.
• a soap-holding frog.

it was almost an out of body experience, really--moving around my future home with my future spouse arranging my future things. every time i go visit, the reality and gravity and joy of what we're doing impresses itself deeper onto my mind. what an amazing thing, to single out and be singled out. to willingly, simultaneously cancel two lives and make a greater one in their stead. how odd.

alright, i'll stop being philosophical. jeez. your mom.

yesterday i made cacie's classic, eggs and rice, before we went out to meet brad. brad informed me that i shouldn't be skeptical, because successful people are never skeptical. brad is a salesman, and benjamin and i weren't responding well to his pitch. but we escaped unscathed and unemptied, and went for a walk around my future (his current) neighborhood. lots of big trees, and attractively overgrown yard-gardens. nice cars. sure, stereotypical suburban america. there are worse places to live. (yes, there are. i want to be able to walk from the car to the door at night after a gig and not get the willies, thank you.) there's a dingy park across the highway, with a reservoir on a hill (one of rochester's two, i think) and an amazing view of downtown. great sunset spot, i'm sure we'll frequent it once the giant flies that lay their eggs in the ground and then buzz up into the trees by the thousands stop doing that.

in other news, i'm going to visit cacie on wednesday and we will go camping. i am excited.

i remember a day like this. six mile creek, nearly four years ago. the perfect rain--clouds glow, birds sing. the world washes its hands.

this is what all those bath stores keep trying to bottle.

mindless and entertaining. but really, really entertaining.

that's right, ladies and gentlemen, i saw mr. and mrs. smith last night. (tuesday night at 10:10 and the theatre was still full.) recommendation: if you're into modern-style action flicks (a la mission impossible ii and the bourne supremacy), go see it. really. this week. the filmmakers pooped the sheets, to quote a wise man, on the execution, but the concept and premise are so compelling that the film somehow survives anyway.

here's a short synopsis for the unenlightened: company a hires john, and company b hires jane, to make a hit (that's i'm-cooler-than-you slang for assassination) in bogota. john and jane simultaneously save each other's lives in the post-hit confusion, fall in love, whirl through courtship and get married, neither knowing the nature of the other's profession. five or six years later, they're carefully perched in therapy chairs for a marriage tune-up, bored to tears with each other.

the remainder of the plot is inevitable, really, and fairly self-explanatory: they're assigned the same hit, id each other while failing their respective assignments, and spend the rest of the movie blowing things up and bickering.

obviously, there are all kinds of logical fallacies and physical impossibilities to that premise, but the filmmakers throw enough flashes, bangs and beautiful people at you that you don't notice--and if you do, you don't care. brad and angelina are plain fun to watch, particularly together (so that's what happened to all that chemistry hayden and natalie couldn't find!), despite MAJOR script inadequacies. i mean, really: with their respective track histories (i know everyone scoffs at tomb raider, but what about *cough* oscar *cough* girl, interrupted?), they deserved a lot more than was delivered. but they're professionals and they made do, and (i thought) came across completely believeable as a married couple. honestly, they did a great job. very detail-oriented. vince vaughn, on the other hand, doesn't fare quite so well as comic relief and pitt-sidekick, eddie. his writing is terrible (at least, i think it was the writing...it could have been the acting...probably both, really...though i usually get a kick out of him...hmm), and his role is superfluous--brad and angelina are quite funny enough on their own.

so yeah, go see it. and then see if you caught which movie it DIDN'T shadow (hint: think the sting and make a few jumps) at the very end, because that was just sketchy for a few seconds.

no, that is not a nonsense phrase.

i'm fried. thoroughly. behold, ladies and gentlemen, what i have been doing all day. (actually, that's what i was doing all day last week, but it all looks the same.) to create an image like that requires the precise calibration and correlation of around ten different files, all coming from different sources. and they don't always match, but if they don't match, you don't figure it out until a good hour or so after you've spent an hour or so making batches of images and recording megabytes of data.

i quit for the day after the last batch turned out to be a dud. nine hours is quite sufficient, thank you. i also had an appointment today with the oral surgeon who will be extracting all four of my wisdom teeth on friday, so i'm not inclined to deal with more than i, uh, feel inclined to deal with. with which i feel inclined to deal.

verbal diarrhea. the surest sign that the last vestiges of sanity are slipping away...

so. festival.

not the greatest year, i thought. i'm accustomed to seeing wildness in every direction--here's a guy wearing a grass skirt (no, i mean just the grass skirt), there's a woman doing kartwheels for no apparent reason, here's a clan of senior citizens sitting in the fountain. this year, the place was infested with teenyboppers. infested. they were everywhere.

thus was my general impression.

the food was fantastic, as usual. benjamin and i missed a good chunk of the music, but we did manage to see the kitchen chair.

you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. i have more to say but i'm wiped. go look at pictures. start at the bottom, it will make more sense that way.

i know, i know, i still haven't posted on the festival. i'm getting there. in the mean time, chew on these:

• yet another reason not to smoke
• moisturizing for guys
• even more china scariness
• this guy can write, yo. check out his darth side.
• classic sinfests

enjoy, i'll be back when i'm done working to upload massive picturage. yeah baby.

i'm not one to jump on the latest greatest political bandwagon, but this might have implications, yo:

c. july 2002:
"There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."
...
"It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

news coverage: cnn cnn cnn nyt (registration required) washington post times of london btc

apparently, this has been a major issue in the uk, but (as you can see) has had very little media coverage in the states.

one note: "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" doesn't (necessarily) mean "intelligence and facts were being made up." it means policy determined which pieces of intelligence were deemed relevant.

which is no better, really, but the disticinction stands.

[more info]

ha, and you thought i'd forget.

so yes, i helped benjamin move from the house that a friend of his was house-sitting into our new apartment at the barrington. it's a great area of town--trip over a coffee shop or restaurant on every corner. and there's an asian cuisine place with bubble tea, which made me happy. benjamin wasn't quite so thrilled with it, but you can't fault him for having no taste, because he's marrying me.

la dee daa....

all that aside, last night was quite the adventure. we inherited a houseful of furniture from my friend janette, and it had all been transported via benjamin's house-sitting friend's pick-up. i brought up the 300-pound (ok, so it wasn't 300, but it was easily 110) computer armoire, the futon minus futon frame, a chair, a dresser and sundry items. we got them all in, piled and scattered throughout the room, did some minor re-arranging.
i'm getting excited about this living-with-benjamin, get-hitched business.
our mothers collectively approve, which is an added perk.

in other news, my brother got me a sword for my birthday! (yes, i know my birthday is in march. yes, i know it's june. leave the guy alone, he bought me a freaking sword.) it's a roman reproduction, the gladius, which was apparently the sword that roman soldiers and gladiators carried. it's shorter, which makes it more wieldy in tight combat than a longer model.

if you haven't picked up on it by now, i've updated my photolog, so go look. there's lots more than i put here.